


Technical Difficulties

by gnimaerd



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-02
Updated: 2014-01-02
Packaged: 2018-01-07 04:08:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1115323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnimaerd/pseuds/gnimaerd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wooing one’s great love is not easy when she's at least three feet taller than you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Technical Difficulties

 

That he must stand on a chair to kiss her quickly becomes a thing of great sport for everyone except Kili.

Because no sooner has an opportune moment arisen, than every dwarf in the immediate vicinity has taken up a chair with look of great and knowing mischief.

Kili finds these childish attempts to foil him unamusing.

What’s worse is that not all chairs get him close enough – dwarf chairs are dwarf sized, after all, and only take him about half a foot further from the ground than he would be were he standing on the floor. Which brings him roughly level with Tauriel’s chest. Which, whilst potentially advantageous in some situations is not at all helpful whilst wooing her in the courtly manner he supposes he ought to be.

So he spends much of his time hunting down the sorts of chairs that men and elves use – or tables, or convenient tree stumps – because he sincerely doubts that Fili will indulge him to the point of letting him sit on his brother’s shoulders.

(Also, Tauriel already spends too much time looking far too amused by his Very Serious and Sincere Efforts for Kili’s liking and he doubts that balancing upon Fili’s shoulders in order to meet her eye would lessen the comic effect).

“Couldn’t you just ask her to kneel down?” Fili suggests, one night.

“What, every time I want to kiss her?” Kili wrinkles his nose, “that’d ruin the mood a bit, don’t you think?”

“No more than you running round the room looking for a chair.”

It still doesn’t quite seem dignified.

“Shall I provide you with a box to stand on?” Tauriel asks, the following week, whilst they are stood on the roof of Bard’s house, keeping watching on the sky.

Kili does not dignify this with an answer – Tauriel has a mischievous glint in her eye.

“You shouldn’t tease a prince,” he tells her, “wars have been started over less.”

“And here was I thinking we’d become a beacon of glorious hope for our respective peoples.” Tauriel is echoing a rather drunken speech recently made by Thorin, during which he seemed, more or less, to grant Kili permission to (quote unquote) ‘get on with things’ with their resident she-elf. Not that Kili had been especially inclined toward needing permission to begin with.

(“It makes him feel better, if he feels like he’s had a say,” he’d told Tauriel, at the time. It had been quite late at night and Thorin was in the middle of aggressively drinking Gloin, Bard and Gandalf under the nearest table and then had, for reasons best known to himself, begun loudly, if somewhat incoherently, outlining the advantages that might just about be had from marrying one of his heirs to a she-elf. Most of those advantages seemed to relate toward how handy very tall children would be in battle. Tauriel had subsequently pulled the most magnificently ugly face at the dwarf king’s back that Kili had ever seen.)

“I’d rather a ladder,” he tells Tauriel, in the wake of her box suggestion, “it’s more manly. Don’t you think?”

Tauriel gives him a long, unreadable look. Kili waves a hand.

“But if I had to carry it around all the time whilst we’re on watch, strapped to my back, I have to suspect it’d become a burden. I mean, how would I ever wield a bow?”

At that, her lips quirk. “How indeed?”

“It’s no good. We’ll just have to shrink the town.”

“Can’t we simply grow you?”

“Now you’re being ridiculous.”

That earns him a proper smile, Tauriel rolling her eyes at the sky as if to ask the clouds how she ever ended up in such company. Kili presses the moment, clambering onto a chimney pot which just about brings him level with her face – although he wobbles some and she darts out a hand to grasp his collar and steady him.

“Don’t go breaking your neck on my account, dwarf.”

“I’ve no intention of it, my lady.” He bows, and she shakes her head at him, her expression warm.

Of course, the great advantage of being significantly shorter than one’s chosen love, thus requiring inventive methods of compensation, is in the opportunity to be clownish.

There is not anything quite so likely to attract a lady – not good looks, not great wealth, not fine clothes, not a beard as long as an Ent is tall – as the ability to make that lady smile. This Kili knows through a little more practice than would be quite decent to admit to Tauriel.

It is not that elves lack a sense of humour, exactly. Simply that they tend to frown upon anything that might be fun, so they aren’t used to laughing. Which means they tend not to consider it as part of their usual courting rituals – and if this is the one thing Kili can offer up that no elf can, then Kili intends to take full advantage.

“Blond, tall and overgrown over there,” Kili says, pointing an arrow at where Legolas is stalking the boundaries of Lake Town like some great cat, “has never made you laugh. Don’t even pretend that he has.”

“You shouldn’t tease a prince, little one – wars have been started over less.”

“I wasn’t teasing!” Kili retorts, “I was making a statement of fact. He has never made you laugh.”

“And you have?”

“You know I have!”

That isn’t quite true. This idea that elves have no sense of humour is largely perpetuated by the fact that they don’t laugh freely and when they do they’re good at hiding it. Tauriel gets a look about her, when she’s laughing – a sort of crinkly-eyed, lop-sided lip curl – but it’s true he’s never actually _heard_ her laugh. He’s simply deduced that that’s probably what she’s doing.

“Don’t mock me, she-elf.” Kili gives her elbow a gentle poke, “amongst my people I’m considered very tall.”

“I’d noticed.”

“And very handsome.”

“Isn’t it considered ideal amongst your kind to have beards?”

“I have a beard!”

“I’ve seen Dwarfish women with more beard than you,” she tells him.

“Well – your people cannot even grow whiskers!”

“Is that meant to be an insult?”

“No,” he considers for a moment. “I’m being – charming. Is it working?”

Tauriel looks him over again, long and evaluating. “Dwarves have very strange ideas about what constitutes charm, don’t they?”

“Not half as strange as elves do.” He’s glad he got up onto the chimney pot, now. As long as she doesn’t take it into her beautiful head to step out of his reach in the immediate future he can probably kiss her whenever he wants to. And given that she seems genuinely worried that he might topple off the chimney pot and fall several stories to his death, she seems unlikely to get out of his reach any time soon.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Technical Difficulties [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4150569) by [the_dragongirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_dragongirl/pseuds/the_dragongirl)




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